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Family Stories
A potpourri of stories about various family members or events
Marcia and her cannabis experiment
After Marcia's meeting with her oncologist on March 19, 2019 (see story about this encounter: The Beginning of the End), we started to pursue home hospice care in Pella. (See story about this: What does a dying person look like?) After being accepted as a home hospice patient on [fill in after checking papers at home], Marcia was then prescribed some morphine in case she had pain (which she had).
In hindsight now, I can see that this March 19 meeting Marcia had with the oncologist triggered a downward spiral in her health. Some of it was just the progress of the cancer within her body, but part of it was also fueled by her recognition that she had begun the dying process. She had been admitted as a hospice patient (which, by definition, presupposes at most a 6-month life expectancy), she had begun taking morphine to handle the pain within her body, and she was sleeping more, tiring more easily, and eating less.
Marcia had been at odds with the traditional approaches of medicine for most of the 46 years that I knew her. She wanted to pursue alternatives to the traditional paths. My guess is this was partly because she saw her mother and her father die under the hands of traditional medicine (for their time), and she saw her sister's outcomes from her traditional treatments for her breast cancer. With the advent of Iowa's laws allowing Iowa’s licensed dispensaries to begin their services on December 1, 2018 (see details), this drew Marcia to check out this avenue of dealing with pain, either instead of or in addition to the morphine she was using. She began using internet searches to learn how to pursue this. The steps now seem to be about what they were then (roughly): obtain a certificate from an appropriate party (such as oncologist, in her situation); register to become a participant and submit a $100 fee; make an appointment with a dispensary after being accepted and buy what you want.
It didn't take Marcia long to investigate these steps and get the ball rolling. On April 6 (18 days after her meeting with the oncologist), I took her to her appointment at MedPharm in Windsor Heights (a suburb of Des Moines). We talked with the people there for some time, and finally she decided on a tincture with equal parts CBD and THC (300 mg/bottle), costing only $90 for a small bottle. (See below for the product brochure.)
Brochure on the Harmony 1:1 Tincture.
Keep in mind that at this point, she had already been taking morphine several times a day for the last 1 to 2 weeks, so she was already benefitting from its reduction in pain. Keep in mind also that she was the daughter of a biologist, and she also understood the scientific method (to a degree). I had advised her to keep up her morphine regimen, or at least partially. However, Marcia insisted on stopping morphine completely and easing into the tincture consumption as specified on the brochure. (It is a little hard to read: days 1-3 consume .25ml once/day; days 4-6, .25ml twice a day; and so on.) Life was very hard for her (and me) in the next three days since she was in so much pain while she tested its effectiveness. On either day 3 or day 4, Marcia caved and started taking morphine again, to my relief, as much as hers. She was hard to live with those first three days. She continued to take the tincture, but she resumed her morphine dosage as in the past.
Published 2025-08-04.
If you find any error(s) in the text, please let me know. Thanks. Contact me with errors or comments using hibbardac@gmail. [Back to the top] [About the author, Al]
Marcia's last major Triplisting of family stories by me The Beginning of the End